Zoho unveils capabilities to boost customer operations

Zoho has unveiled ‘Zoho CRM for Everyone’ – an innovative set of capabilities designed to extend customer relationship management (CRM) to all teams engaged in customer operations.

The launch marks a significant advancement in CRM strategy by enabling seamless communication and coordination among diverse teams from a single platform.

The primary beneficiaries of this development are sales teams, typically the custodians of customer relationships, who will now be able to manage various customer deliverables within the realms of solutions engineering, contract management, sales enablement, customer onboarding, and advocacy.

According to Zoho, these new capabilities will enhance visibility for every stakeholder along the customer journey, bridge coordination gaps, reduce turnaround times, and elevate the overall quality of the customer experience. Liz Miller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, praised Zoho’s initiative.

“Modern CRM strategies demand that the entire enterprise contribute and orchestrate actions around revenue-driving motions,” she said. “Zoho’s vision for CRM for Everyone meets this demand by fostering connected collaboration and a project management mindset, which can drive more profitable customer relationships,” she said.

Traditionally, CRM systems have been constructed by IT departments with a focus on sales workflows. Over time, while these systems have built substantial customer context, access remains limited, leading to operational silos. Zoho’s Chief Operating Officer Mani Vembu highlighted that this approach undermines the customer experience.

“Zoho CRM for Everyone dismantles these silos, making it easier for different teams within the sales process to participate productively while reducing CRM complexity,” Vembu explained.

Zoho CRM for Everyone enables diverse tasks to be managed cohesively within a single CRM system. Account managers can engage solutions engineers for product demonstrations, specialists can oversee the customer onboarding process, marketers can conduct win-loss analyses for specific deals, and community specialists can manage advocacy engagements. Each team operates using core applications suited to deep work but can converge on the CRM platform to manage shared customer responsibilities.

The platform incorporates several key features to support this transformation:

Team Modules: Business teams can now create their own data modules tailored to their needs while remaining governed by IT protocols. These modules, featuring team-specific fields, permissions, workflow automation, and customisations, reside in dedicated spaces for each team.

Requester Profile: Team members can easily request deliverables or contributions from colleagues across different teams. The status of these requests can be tracked, eliminating guesswork involved in collaborative efforts.

Refreshed User Experience: The Zoho CRM interface has been redesigned to improve usability across roles and functions. Teams can organise their data within modules and access no-code or low-code tools for managing workflows without requiring deep IT skills. Accessibility improvements have also been made to support enhanced vision, motor activity, and interactions.

Alongside CRM for Everyone, Zoho announced updates to its collaboration, cyber security, and developer platform offerings.

Enhancements to the collaboration portfolio aim to foster unified project management and productive asynchronous collaboration. Updates to Zoho’s security stack will bolster protections against tracking, breaches, and attacks. For developers, Zoho introduced new services within Catalyst by Zoho, a pro-code platform, and announced the general availability of Zoho Apptics for seamless application-analytics integration.

The early access phase for Zoho CRM for Everyone is now available to Zoho customers globally, with plans to introduce additional capabilities over the coming weeks. This initiative is poised to position Zoho CRM at the heart of customer operations, driving a wave of customer experience (CX) transformation across industries.